Chapter 58: Catching Up on Sleep and Fulfilling Some Duties

Bai Yue stared at the miserable state of the two, completely dumbfounded.

“Hold on, what happened?”

She walked over and tapped her finger on the stone table, producing a crisp tok-tok-tok.

“You two cosplaying pandas or something?”

At the sound of her voice, Xiao Yueluo turned her head slowly.

“What… cos?”

Her voice was hoarse yet carried a faint trace of satisfaction.

Meanwhile, Su Qingyan just mumbled weakly: “Bai Yue… you’re here…………”

Bai Yue raised an eyebrow, pulled over a stone stool, and sat down with her arms crossed.

“What, sounded like you two were pretty busy in there last night—did you pull an all-nighter?”

Not mentioning it was one thing.

But at the mention of it, Su Qingyan’s fury—mixed with a heavy dose of grievance—burst forth instantly.

She sat upright abruptly, pointed a trembling finger at Xiao Yueluo, and ground out through clenched teeth: “Her!

She insisted I try on the pair with the most mesh!

And then those straps somehow tangled themselves into a goddamn knot with that black suspender thing!”

The more Su Qingyan spoke, the more agitated she became—her eyes were even reddening at the edges.

“Do you have any idea how hard those metal clasps were to undo?!

We were thrashing around on the bed for half the night, our fingers were raw, and we only just managed to free ourselves from that pile of fabric!”

Bai Yue was stunned for a moment.

Then, barely suppressing the corners of her mouth from curling up, she began trembling uncontrollably at the shoulders.

So all that racket they’d made wasn’t some intimate affair—it was life-or-death combat against suspender buckles?

“Ahem…” Bai Yue clenched her fist against her lips and let out a light cough to hide her laughter.

“Alright, now that you’ve freed yourselves, stop complaining.

You both look like absolute train wrecks—get back to your room and get some proper rest.

Especially you, Xiao Yueluo—you’ve still got the spirit-root restoration procedure tonight.”

At those words, Xiao Yueluo struggled to her feet, helped up the equally unsteady Su Qingyan, and the two wobbled their way back to their room.

Thump.

The door closed behind them.

The courtyard fell quiet once more.

Watching the two enter, Bai Yue stood up and stretched.

Since they were off catching up on sleep, she had nothing better to do—might as well go fulfill her duties as supervisor.

The rear mountain mine.

This was the deepest abyss of this spirit-sealing land.

The air was thick with the acrid stench of dust, mingled with the sour tang of sweat and the metallic bite of blood.

Clang—Ding—

The sound of pickaxes striking hard rock—monotonous, numbing, rising and falling in relentless rhythm.

Bai Yue stood on an outcropping of rock above the mining pit, looking down from her vantage point.

Hundreds of ragged figures moved like ants within the pit.

Without exception, these people were heinous criminals of the cultivation world—those who had committed unforgivable sins, had their cultivation stripped, and had been exiled here.

Murdering for cultivation bases, massacring entire cities and clans, cultivating evil arts…

Any single one of them, out in the wider world, had once been a name that struck terror into the hearts of all who heard it.

But now, they were nothing but manual labor in a mine.

Crack!

A sharp whip-crack split the murky air.

“Move faster!

Anyone who doesn’t meet today’s quota doesn’t eat!”

A burly mortal overseer swung a barbed leather whip, lashing it fiercely across the back of a gaunt old man who had slowed down just a moment too long.

The old man stumbled and crashed onto the pile of gravel—a bloody gash instantly appearing on his back.

But then, almost immediately, the flesh at the edges of the wound began to twitch slightly, quickly clotting and scabbing over.

—Even with their cultivation stripped, a cultivator’s physical foundation remained formidable.

The old man lay face-down in the dirt and didn’t move.

But from behind the tangled hair covering his face, a flash of murderous intent blazed in his eyes.

Who was he?

He had once been an Elder of the Blood Soul Sect!

Out there, he could have killed a mortal like this with a single breath—a hundred thousand times over!

The old man gritted his teeth, his fingers curling slightly as he attempted to mobilize the last wisp of residual spiritual power within his body.

Hum—

The instant his killing intent arose, a dark red formation pattern on his neck blazed to life.

“AAAAAH!!!”

A bloodcurdling scream tore through the mining pit.

The old man clutched his neck, writhing in agony on the ground—the skin on his neck sizzled from the formation’s searing heat, the smell of scorched flesh quickly filling the air.

“Looking to die?”

The mortal overseer sneered, planting a kick right into the old man’s chest.

“Once you’re in this spirit-sealing land, all you are is a dog!

Try using spiritual power again, and the next thing that explodes will be your head!”

The surrounding criminals stared with deadened eyes; no one dared to stop their work and spare a second glance.

Bai Yue watched this scene in silence, her expression utterly unmoved.

The reason they could entrust authority to mortal overseers, with only one person on the high ground watching over things, was precisely because of the death-contract restrictions etched into these criminals.

This was the proudest creation of the Myriad Formation Peak’s Peak Master.

If a prisoner so much as conceived the thought of escaping or resisting, the formation would trigger automatically.

As for why they weren’t simply executed, but went through all the trouble of stripping their cultivation and keeping them alive—

It was because spirit-sealing ore was exceptionally difficult to mine; ordinary mortal physiques simply couldn’t handle the work.

Only these cultivators, with their robust bodies, were the perfect disposable tools.

The overseers were really only there to handle exceptional circumstances.

Bai Yue jumped down from the rock and walked step by step down the hewn stone stairs into the mining pit.

Her presence seemed to freeze the very air around her.

Several burly men hauling ore looked up, fixing her with sinister stares.

They could sense that this woman wore no spirit-sealing shackles.

A free person.

To these trapped monsters in the abyss, that made her a particularly enticing target.

If they could drain a cultivator’s spiritual energy…

But when Bai Yue stopped walking and swept her cold, condescending gaze over them, each of them felt a chill shoot through their hearts—as if they’d just been locked onto by some primordial beast—and quickly lowered their heads.

“You lot over there.”

Bai Yue halted and pointed at a pile of freshly mined ore, her voice cool.

“Separate the spirit-sealing stones from the jade and the refined iron.”

The prisoners exchanged glances but didn’t move.

No one here had ever been so particular about the purity of the ore before.

“I’m not going to repeat myself.”

Bai Yue stepped forward and nudged a piece of inferior jade marred with black speckles with her toe.

“If the isolating coating of the conversion chamber gets mixed with iron filings, it’ll explode when running at high temperature.”

Though they understood absolutely nothing about “conversion chambers” or “coatings,” under Bai Yue’s unquestionable pressure, the prisoners swallowed nervously and obediently crouched down to start picking out the black-speckled jade pieces, one by one.

She made a full circuit of the mining area.

No formation patterns had failed; no one had attempted to escape.

After all, in this godforsaken place—with no one for hundreds of miles in any direction—even if they managed to flee the mining pit, all that awaited them was death by thirst and starvation.

Having confirmed the progress of the material extraction, Bai Yue didn’t linger.

She turned and left that pit of despair behind.

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